I'm skipping summer this year. I made the transition from the Western Hemisphere to south of the equator and we are now teetering on the cusp of winter. The nights and mornings are cool, the air cut through with the smoky scent of Kenya, and I find myself reaching again for thicker socks and another sweater. Strange, but not unwelcome.

I am nearly two weeks in (but it feels like three years), and things are getting easier every day. Great is thy faithfulness. I've settled into a routine and the days are long, but the work is fulfilling, and I am beginning to be in a place where I am able to take in the wonder of this country without a constant veil of tears. The first week was hard, so much harder than I though it'd be. I didn't know it was possible to cry that much, and I'm not going to lie, I questioned my sanity in coming here. I was warned about the intensity of my emotions, and I thought I was prepared, but I was still knocked off my feet. But this too shall pass and the rawness has begun to ebb and for that I am grateful. Perhaps it will hit me later -- I don't know, I'm so new at all this -- but I was surprised at my lack of culture shock. Kenya is very unlike home, but it feels normal, this season, this environment, this life right now. I'm not sure how to put it into words, but though it is not easy being here, there is an indescribable transcending peace. Morning by morning new mercies I see.

There is a framed world map displayed on a living room wall at the Trump's house and I find myself studying it several times a day. I trace the distance from Oklahoma to Kenya, from Germany to Kenya and it seems impossibly far. Halfway around the world. And I wonder: how is this happening to me?

After arriving in Nairobi late Tuesday evening (following a harrowing departure in Germany including, but not limited to, canceled train connections and tornado-like damage littering the streets, etc) I got on another plane Wednesday afternoon and headed to Kisumu. I was picked up at the airport by a taxi driver sporting a sign with my name on it and spent the next forty-five minutes clutching my seat belt as we weaved through traffic on extraordinarily bumpy roads. In Yala, a rural town in western Kenya, I joined an American medical missions team that was running a clinic in a nearby school. I am grasping for words to describe the experience without sounding...cliche. I don't know if the words will ever be available. There, before my eyes, were the things I'd heard about and seen pictured for so long, yet I can't tell you what it does to you to actually be there in the thick of it. My heart ached and was overwhelmed and more homesick that I thought I'd be and I didn't know how I felt. I still don't, actually. All I know that, no matter how hard it was (and still continues to be), I am supposed to be here.

“What do you say when the feelings don’t fit into words?" 

- Tammara Webber

The problem is that most everything has remained the same, but you haven't.

The right words are hard to come by here, but I've heard--and it's true--that it's near-impossible to transform your travels to the written word when you're still living them. Hence, visual documentation and a few not-very-well-written paragraphs scribbled into my diary at night. Savoring, treasuring, storing it all up for a rainy day.

“When I was younger I had such a strange idea of living. I never went anywhere because I thought you needed money to have adventures. And I realize now the silent pressure of my culture made me think if I went somewhere I had to buy something. That an adventure needed a souvenir. Well now I know differently. A tank of gas and twenty extra bucks is more than enough if I bring my mind and my eyes and know how to make conversation with people. And even if I don’t talk to people, the rooms and the streets and the open fields I’m in still talk to me. You in contact with the world around you, that’s what adventure really is.”

— Stimie